Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert´s contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist´s meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction.